E-Book, Englisch, 640 Seiten
Cartarescu Solenoid
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80533-320-3
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025
E-Book, Englisch, 640 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-320-3
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Mircea C?rt?rescu is a writer, professor, and journalist who has published more than twenty-five books. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others. His work has been translated in twenty-three languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago in Sean Cotter's English translation.
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17
my mother raised me as a girl, under the enormous skies of the slums. She let my dark gold hair grow halfway down my back, and she put it in braids. She made me fanciful dresses out of material she got from her sister, bell-shaped dresses like the pink or blue felt doll dresses that populated our dark rooms, alongside glass fish, lacquered stems in vases, and hand-colored photographs in frames of crushed glass. She changed my adornments daily: a new hairstyle, a ring of cherries for my ear; she undressed and dressed me as she had, when she was a child in her Tântava, wrapped rags around the wooden spoons that the girls used for dolls. The little icicle between my legs didn’t stop her from fulfilling the dream or the fantasy hidden deep in the twisted nautilus of her mind. I needed to be a girl, since she only had me left of her two boys, and with that, basta. My father would frown and swear when he saw me transvested, but he didn’t see much, and what he did didn’t reach that deeply into his consciousness; there, where he himself should be, was nothing but an empty room. He would swear and move on, as clouds move over an empty sky. Because my father would never live, never feel true pleasure or true sorrow, he passed through life like a sleepwalker with velvety brown eyes, without knowing he was alive, without knowing that he should wonder from time to time what being in the world was about. He would have slept next to a wolf and raised a baby dragon, as long as he was left alone, as long as no one spoke to him. He would often stare off into space—this is my only inheritance—and then he would make such an unpleasant effort to leave the pitiful mysticism of an empty, comfortable mind, floating like a milk-drugged baby, that my mother and I came to the understanding that in fact my father wasn’t there, even if he came home in the evening from the ITB workshop smelling of grease and lathe filings, even if we ate together, even if all three of us slept in the same bed. Everything that happened in our little room on Silistra happened between my mother and me.
The girl-boy went on bicycle rides through the edge of town with our neighbors. The child would tromp up the stairs to the second story of the U-shaped house painted a sinister purple. She would tease the turkeys in the wire pen. She would go out on the street, between puddles and mud, to play with other kids. All the flowers in the yard were taller than her. The smell of wastewater, the slum’s most powerful smell, irritated her nostrils when the spring wind licked the shanties along the street. The house with the blind wall next door, the dark, low grocery at the end of the street, and the yard across the way with its colored globes stuck on bean stakes wound with tendrils, and, especially, the luminous and compact clouds above—these filled her with wonder, even though she didn’t know anything else, as though she were a traveler who suddenly found an enigmatic realm of unexpected splendor, completely enclosed within its own strangeness.
I can remember how happy I was to be a girl, how proud I was of my braids tied with elastic from old underpants, I remember my red, patent leather sandals that my mother kept for a long time … But the feminine part of the chimera that I was disappeared the day my mother took me, along an unknown path, through the unbearable whiteness of the blizzard, “to play with Doru’s toys.” My dresses and braids disappeared that day, forever, and no one ever took me for a girl again. Today, it feels as though I had been a girl in a previous life, as though the girl left a hole shaped like her body in the petrified ash of my mind, like those left by the people incinerated at Pompeii. I have kept the ash-blond braids in their yellowed paper bag. One end is cut and tied tightly with a rubber band, the other is frayed, emerging from the soft braid of hair like the tip of a delicate brush. Often, at night, when I am looking at my poor little treasures, I take the braids out, I lay them across my palm like soft animals, then I go to the mirror and hold them up to either side of my head. A strange chimera looks back at me: adult-child and man-woman, happy-unhappy in his only certainty: loneliness.
Then we moved to Floreasca, to a small apartment block with a pointed roof that we lovingly called “the villa.” It was a yellow building, with smooth plaster that bubbled in places like a lemon peel. In front there were always enormous roses, and above, the sky with pink veins, like resin. The sky was domed like a bell, holding the entire neighborhood under its jar. If we wanted to go somewhere, we had to cross through the sky. There were only three places we had to go: the grocery, with the bread distributor attached, the clinic, and the state militia building. I could go to the first one by myself, with coins in my hand. It was at the end of the street, just beyond the gelatin wall of the sky. I boldly pushed through the two or three meters of blue gelatin and found myself outside, where above there was no sky, just a gray void. The clerk at the bread store always marveled at the azure drops left in my hair and on my clothes after I crossed the blue gelatin wall, she gave me bread made especially for me by the baker next door—it was braided, red-brown, and always had a surprise in its puffy flesh: a little plastic biplane, a scrap of paper with a heart drawn by a trembling hand, a jade ring … Then she would put the change in my hand: two or three large metal coins with the national symbol on one side. This was money, it would buy you anything. It was kept in the kitchen table drawer. There was also paper money, with detailed drawings on it, but that was so crumpled and torn and stuck with chocolate and marked with permanent marker that you couldn’t even make out the faces. My mother kept paper money in the chiffonier, under a stack of clothes. I only liked the coins, and I played with them endlessly. I would arrange them in flowers over the reflections of light on the dining table, and, at my aunt’s, I would put them on a magnet and make chains of five or six coins, stuck to each other by their edges, since the coins also became magnets. When I moved them closer, they jumped together: click. And they were so hard to pull apart you’d think they were sad to say un-click …
I only went to the clinic or the militia station with my mother. The two of us, hand in hand, were much stronger, and we made such an impression on the walls of sky curving down to the asphalt that two blue, transparent creatures popped out that looked just like us, walking ahead of us holding hands, then after a bit they dissolved under the gray sky, leaving my mother and me with azure droplets in our hair, walking the twisted and unfamiliar paths under skeletal trees, through the enormous world. My mother knew the way and I knew my mother, and in the end we reached the clinic, a long, low building, divided into lots of offices inside. Each one had an examination table covered halfway in a pinkish-brown mat; a white, iron scale that also measured your height to see how much you had grown; and a white cabinet with glass shelves that held nickeled metal boxes. Each office also had a young doctor, with a stethoscope in her ears and curly copper hair falling loose down to her waist.
Likewise, the beds had half-undressed patients, their ribcages rising and falling. The doctors pressed the frozen foot of the stethoscope to the patient’s chest or back and listened attentively, as though their hearts were saying something serious and important. One bed was always empty, and that’s where I would lie down. My mother waited in a corner, playing with the sliding weights on the scale, or reading the pamphlets where ugly microbes bared their broken teeth. Lipsticked and perfumed, with gentle, soft movements, the redheaded doctor was ready to examine me.
She asked me to stick out my tongue and pressed a metal-tasting utensil on top of it so she could look at my throat. I would cough and feel like I would vomit. She looked quickly through my hair for lice, keeping her own away from my suspicious head. She would press on my stomach for signs of hives. She would pass her stethoscope over my ribs, clearly visible through my skin, and ask me to breathe deeply. She would ask if I had worms. Oh, I had them all the time, they really itched at night, but the worm pill looked like a bar of soap, green with fibers in it, and it was unbearably bitter, so I would say I didn’t, but my mother, who could hear me writhing in my bed at night, would divulge my embarrassing secret to the doctor. Yes, I had pinworms, as the doctor said, I had even seen them once—small and thin, very white, shiny and mischievous, moving there in the jar with the fecal sample. Before becoming someone, I was my own little body, perhaps that is why I spoke about myself like I was a thing like any other: it, I would say, it. Then I understood that I wasn’t a body, I had one, that I was its tenant and its prisoner. I didn’t have worms or nits or constipation or hives, but it did, the one made of a soft and shifting material, the it where I lived. When I was suffering from an illness, even though the illness was not mine, but its, the cell walls where I was the prisoner seemed to become damp or to burn so hard that the fire would take my breath away, or freeze me through. My body made me suffer sadistically, it was my mortal enemy, it was a stomach that digested me, little by little. It was the trap of a...
